Jimmy Lerner

Background

Jimmy Lerner was born on June 22, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was brought up in a stable, loving, two-parent home in Brooklyn; his father was a doctor.

Education

Jimmy Lerner received a Master of Business Administration from Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

Career

Before becoming a guest of the Nevada State Prison System, Jimmy Lerner worked as a marketing analyst in San Francisco, a cab driver in New York City, and a soldier in Panama. He worked for Pacific Bell as an executive. While incarcerated, Lerner wrote a book about his imprisonment and the killing of Mark A. Slavin, which was published under the title You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish in 2002. He also wrote a book of poetry, It's All Part of the Punishment.

The case involved Jimmy Lerner, convicted in Washoe County of manslaughter for the 1998 death of Mark Slavin. Police were called to the Sundowner Hotel after a maid discovered a dead man in a room on the 20th floor. A short time later, Lerner called from a payphone in the hotel, said he was a friend of the victim and was questioned by homicide investigators. Lerner said he and the man, whose name was not immediately released, had been staying in Reno and got into a fight. He said he was defending himself, but after further questioning, police arrested him for investigation of open murder.

Lerner claimed that he had already been wrestling with marital problems, substance abuse, and tenuous employment when he met Mark Slavin at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Slavin eventually accompanied Lemer to a Reno hotel, where the two men indulged in drugs and alcohol. Lerner claimed that he killed Slavin in self-defense, strangling him with a belt after being attacked with a knife. On the advice of his attorney, Lerner pled guilty to two counts of manslaughter, and he received two six-year sentences, to be served consecutively. He began his first sentence on July 4, 1999, and after three parole attempts was released on January 4, 2002.

In prison, Lerner's sense of humor endears him to other inmates, and his relatively advanced age - late forties - spares him from the violence of sexual exploitation. He even wins the nickname O.G., an abbreviation of Original Gangster, for the grim nature of his crime. The covert writing proved a profitable antidote to the monotony of jail. He had never had anything published before but left prison in January not only with a book that excited his publishers but $175,000 richer, thanks to the United States and the United Kingdom advances. You Got Nothing Coming is a grim and vivid account of life inside the unnamed dehumanizing Nevada jail which was his home between 1998 and 2002, and the events leading up to Lerner's imprisonment there.

It was first smuggled out to his friend Barry Demant four pages at a time in the form of letters. The completed draft was smuggled back in for typing and editing. He had found himself an agent picked at random out of a writers' guide, who sent the manuscript to various editors. An auction ensued and Broadway Books in New York, part of Random House, bought the book. Gerry Howard at Broadway took Lerner under his wing.

Lerner called him from jail every Tuesday afternoon for telephone editing sessions. The results were then typed up laboriously using an ancient typewriter he managed to acquire and sent out a second time. As each part of the original manuscript was edited, typed up, and mailed out, the original handwritten version was disposed of down the cell lavatory. He was as protective of his secret stash of words as his cellmates were over the wraps of speed they sold inside the jail.

Achievements

• When Jimmy Lerner's book, You Got Nothing Coming, appeared in 2002, it readily won praise as a compelling document. A Publishers Weekly reviewer summarized it as "the most gripping, and most inviting, prison memoir in years."

Works

More photos

• book

  • You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

    (A memoir of astonishing power - the true story of a middl...)

    2002

Connections

Jimmy Lerner divorced in 1998. He had two daughters.